• andallthat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    7 months ago

    Just wanted to point out that the Pinterest examples are conflating two distinct issues: low-quality results polluting our searches (in that they are visibly AI-generated) and images that are not “true” but very convincing,

    The first one (search results quality) should theoretically be Google’s main job, except that they’ve never been great at it with images. Better quality results should get closer to the top as the algorithm and some manual editing do their job; crappy images (including bad AI ones) should move towards the bottom.

    The latter issue (“reality” of the result) is the one I find more concerning. As AI-generated results get better and harder to tell from reality, how would we know that the search results for anything isn’t a convincing spoof just coughed up by an AI? But I’m not sure this is a search-engine or even an Internet-specific issue. The internet is clearly more efficient in spreading information quickly, but any video seen on TV or image quoted in a scientific article has to be viewed much more skeptically now.

      • bluewing@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        7 months ago

        Provenance. Track the origin.

        Easy to say, often difficult to do.

        There can be 2 major difficulties with tracking to origin.

        1. Time. It can take a good amount of time to find the true origin of something. And you don’t have the time to trace back to the true origin of everything you see and hear. So you will tend to choose the “source” you most agree with introducing bias to your “origin”.
        2. And the question of “Is the ‘origin’ I found the real source?” This is sometimes referred to Facts by Common Knowledge or the Wikipedia effect. And as AI gets better and better, original source material is going to become harder to access and harder to verify unless you can lay your hands on a real piece of paper that says it’s so.

        So it appears at this point in time, there is no simple solution like “provenance” and " find the origin".

        • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          Humans will need to use digital signatures eventually. Chains of verifiable claims from real humans would be used. Still doesn’t prove anything by itself, but it saves a ton of effort. That, plus verifiable timestamping.

    • Venator@lemmy.nzEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Seems like it will be a bigger issue for wikipedia and journalists than google.